In the Category, “What Was Chloe Thinking?”

This photo, believe it or not, depicts Chloe’s spelling homework. Out of sheer laziness, because her regular pencils needed to be sharpened, Chloe decided to use a yellow pencil instead. I am old and over 40, but the words on that piece of paper were nothing less than illegible, even for a 28-year old 2nd grade teacher (I don’t know how old her teacher is, but that’s an educated guess. She’s a lot younger than I am in any case).

When we asked our dear daughter to demonstrate how the teacher would be able to decipher her prose, she had to hold the paper about 3 feet away from her face. This is an eight-year old with perfect vision.

I told Chloe that she had a choice. She certainly didn’t need to rewrite the homework, but if she didn’t and turned in the yellow blob, the teacher would likely have her redo it anyway. That appeal to her common sense worked – to a certain degree. Until she tearily confessed that she simply didn’t like recopying things. Solution: I squinted my eyes, held the paper up to the light at just the right angle (because if too much light fell on the paper, the yellow pencil disappeared entirely) and dictated her scribblings back to her.

I love my girls. Why? For all of the usual reasons, but also because on a night like this, when I’m tired, cranky and not particularly in the mood to write, one of them inevitably provides me with a laugh and an irresistible theme for a blog entry.